Sophomore Buse Aktas participated in the Engineers Without Borders undergraduate team that is helping to build a community library in Ashaiman, Ghana. In this second video about the project, team members help complete construction on the building, which includes infrastructure for the project's digital literacy component.

Video stills courtesy of Jeremy Blair

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Video feature: The Ghana school library initiative, part 2

Posted March 1, 2012; 12:00 p.m.

by Jeremy Blair

In the summer of 2011, five students from Princeton University's Engineers Without Borders (EWB) chapter spent two months in Ashaiman, Ghana, to finish the construction of a community library. This video chronicles the trip, which was the culmination of a three-year project to provide the area with improved education and digital resources.

The finished structure is now fully operational and open to the public. The library features electric lighting and fans, 37 netbooks and a charging station, and more than 7,000 labeled and catalogued books.

Over the course of their time in Ghana, the members of the EWB team were involved in hands-on construction tasks, oversight activities, educational sessions with students and teachers, and forays into Ghana's culture, history and natural beauty. The travel team members were sophomore Buse Aktas, junior Jeremy Blair, sophomore Cole Freeman, and juniors Elizabeth O'Grady and Akhil Reddy.

To learn more about students' experience with the initiative, view the first video on the EWB Ghana library project.

Funders for the EWB Ghana library initiative include the Class of 1978 Fund, the Fred Fox '39 Fund, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education, the Norman D. Kurtz '58 Fund, the Princeton Environmental Institute, the Princeton Grand Challenges Initiative, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, the Thornton Tomasetti Foundation, and the School of Engineering and Applied Science.